Women Have Lost More Than Jobs In This Pandemic

Today, March 8, is International Women’s Day. Having grown in popularity over the last several years, it’s a day often used to celebrate women’s historical achievements and to make nice sounding platitudes about gender equality. But what we really need in this moment is real action from those in positions to effect change now. The theme this year is “Choose to Challenge.” For women, we have no choice but to challenge. My hope this IWD is that anyone and everyone who does have that choice, commits to taking meaningful action toward equality. 

A few years ago, a case came before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Rizo v. Yovino had all the potential to be a landmark case in the history of sex discrimination; the plaintiff, a math educator named Aileen Rizo, brought suit against the school district alleging that she was paid less than her male peers because she was a woman. The named defendant, the superintendent of Fresno County’s public school system, maintained that sex was not a factor in her salary, as it was based on her previous wages, as were those of her coworkers. 

Sounds dry, right? Hang tight. It’s getting good.

The Ninth Circuit held that under the Equal Pay Act, employers cannot use prior salary—alone or in part—when setting compensation, and prior earnings cannot justify pay differential between employees. In doing so, the Ninth Circuit overruled precedent and effectively expanded the interpretation of the Equal Pay Act and its protections. Crucially, it’s a decision that narrowed a long-exploited loophole that allowed employers to pay women less simply because they’re women, as basing salary decisions on previous earnings could be used to perpetuate existing patterns of pay discrimination. Since women are paid less generally speaking, using previous earnings as a foundation for salary decisions doesn’t eliminate gender bias; it uses its existence to ensure its continuance. The decision—followed closely by women’s rights groups—is quietly revolutionary, holding the potential to uplift women from perpetual second-class status. But, as it so often goes with progress, we took a step forward only to get knocked several back. 

The pandemic knocked the gyro of women’s advancement in the workplace off center, where it had been reliably (if slowly) spinning since the middle of the 1960s. In the last year, more than 2.3 million women left the American workforce, reaching our lowest participation levels since the end of the Reagan administration. That’s over thirty years of gains wiped out in less than one. Many will not return. And many who do will find themselves facing a greater mountain to scale with a whole lot less footing. 

While much of this decline is due to the pandemic hitting industries dominated by women—like hospitality, retail and childcare—particularly hard, it isn’t the whole picture, and we’ve been witnessing our deliberate sidelining in real time. Across the country, women were told in tones ranging from friendly concern to venomous that we were spread too thin, and if we couldn’t focus solely on work—over, say, raising our children, maintaining our homes, or any of the countless other thankless tasks once called “women’s work” in polite company and not even just behind our backs—we’d be out of a job. Florida State University attracted significant backlash for making this a formal policy last summer, but management across the land has had these conversations, too. And to compound this issue, women are often viewed as less committed and more expendable than their male counterparts when companies have to let employees go. If you have to cut someone, cut the person with kids to raise, the thinking apparently goes. 

The Ninth Circuit’s decision is only binding within its jurisdiction (federal courts in Alaska, Arizona, California, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Washington state, Guam, and the Northern Mariana Islands). Which means for now, this groundbreaking interpretation of the Equal Pay Act is limited. Moreover, it directly contradicts standing precedent in the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. All of which means that women across the country lack protection against pay history-based salary discrimination. It’s those women who are going to pay a hugely disproportionate price. How do we know this? Because it’s a price we’ve been paying for decades.

Women get paid less, first, because there’s a baked-in, unspoken, archaic assumption that our salaries are secondary household income. That was likely to be true in the middle of the last century, but no more; women breadwinners have gradually been on the rise, and today, some 30% of married American women in dual-income households earn more than their husbands (leaving, of course, the 70% who don’t). Women are several times more likely to be a single parent than men. Hell, we were a solid majority of the workforce at the start of 2020. But the disparity continues. That means we’re more likely to have resume gaps, which makes us less attractive hires and limits our ability to command higher salaries. We were still struggling against these realities even before the pandemic tossed millions of us out of work. 

Perhaps you can see the pattern. Perhaps you can detect the reason we ought to be concerned. We’ve lost jobs, yes, by the millions, but while men have lost jobs as well, those trends discussed above don’t hit them. In fact, for months, even when overall jobs were making gains, women were still losing ground. Up and down, the pandemic has reinforced traditional gender roles, shunting women back into the role of homemaker, a role that we’ve historically faced immense difficulty escaping. We have fewer women in the promotion pipeline than we did a year ago and fewer women in hiring and decision-making roles. It’s going to be rough reclaiming what we’ve lost. Our salaries will take years to recover, resulting in a loss of lifetime earning potential for women as a class that will reverberate for decades to come. So we have to follow the example of women like Aileen Rizo and so many others before her and keep pushing back because we can make a difference when we do.

There is hope. There is always hope. But bringing it to life will require not only solidarity amongst ourselves, but the active (and proactive) collaboration of men in positions to effect change. Take heart that these concerns are being echoed at the highest echelons of power, at a time when we have a woman serving as vice president. Rebuilding will take effort, and planning, and time. But if there’s one thing women know how to do, it’s make things happen. We can fix this. We must fix this. 

We will fix this.